Truth be told, I didn’t really expect mortal rice wine to be able to get me drunk. It was generally a constant in cultivation stories that you needed spiritual rice wine to get cultivators properly intoxicated. Mortal alcohol might work at lower realms, but definitely not by core formation. All the same, I was a little disappointed. Despite the odds, I’d held out hope.
It wasn’t totally ineffectual. But that almost made it worse. I could feel the buzz, in the distance, just out of reach. It was that pleasant feeling, when you’ve had your first couple of sips of something strong, and there’s the barest hint of a headrush. But then it never advanced further, it just faded away. I never got to the proper buzz. I’d throw back a saucer of ‘wine’ that was probably at least seventy proof, feel the burn, feel it just begin to hit me, and then my body would neutralize the poison within me. It was the worst sort of tease.
I had been consoling myself all night with the thought that even though I couldn’t get drunk, at least it meant it’d be harder to poison me. It was cold comfort, worn thin by overuse. I sighed, and shot back another round. I was going saucer for saucer with Qin Wenyan and Zhao Xue, who were already quite drunk. I couldn’t drink more. It wouldn’t be polite to hog Wenyan’s booze when it was doing so little for me.
“Hongyan’s piss but you can hold your drink.” Qin Wenyan slurred. “Have another!”
I pulled my cup back, effortlessly dodging the bottle before he could refill it.
“My tolerance isn’t your problem.”
The bottle tipped dangerously above my new robes, threatening to spill the opaque, tan, rice wine all over my favorite set, pale lavender silk with subtle dark purple designs that looked like abstract clouds. I relented, and stopped zipping my hand around, allowing Qin Wenyan to refill my saucer.
I sipped this one, he’d just refill it again if I shot it back. It wasn’t what I’d call good, but I couldn’t say it was bad either. It was interesting, earthier and more bitter than a modern sake or soju. Part of the earthiness was definitely just the taste of rice starch, I was pretty sure the fermentation wasn’t finished. Overall, it was far from my favorite, nowhere near sweet enough for my usual tastes, but I couldn’t say I minded it. But then, I’d always been a loyal fan of the 11 dollar a handle Polish potato vodka I’d first tried in college, perhaps I just had no taste.
“Hongyan’s piss?” I asked, curious.
“Cause, y’know, there’d be a lot of it. If she pissed on ya. Dragon that big must tinkle hard enough to flood a river.” He replied.
Zhao Xue, who was swaying back and forth like a metronome now, snorted hard enough to almost spill his wine.
“Wenyan!”
“What? There’s no girls here. I can talk about dragons tinkling.”
“Pretty sure you’re not supposed to talk about piss with cultivator’s either.” Zhao Xue said.
“Does that make cultivators count as girls for the purposes of drinking?” Qin Wenyan mused from the safety of his living room. “Does that make them all fairies?”
Neither I nor Zhao Xue dignified that with a response.
“That’s a silly rule, anyway.” He continued undeterred. “Shit, women piss. Dragons piss. I bet fairies piss too.”
“They don’t.” I said quietly. “Not if they’ve risen high enough. There’s no need to piss if you don’t drink anything.”
“What!” Qin Wenyan exclaimed. “Well then they should just drink anyway shouldn’t they? A good drink is worth the piss, even if they don’t need water no more.”
“Even then, it gets fuzzy. The body holds water better than it should. Releases less than it takes in. Many drink nothing except tea on social occasions, I wouldn’t be surprised if they never visit a bathroom.”
There was an invitation there, perhaps. Or at least an opening. To ask again how high I’d climbed, to know this little fact. I wasn’t sure if I’d answer, or what I’d say if I did. Qin Wenyan at least understood how high the climb went. What it meant, for someone to be in core formation, or beyond it. It was one thing, to know I was a cultivator, a real one, not a former soldier with a handful of small realms under his belt like him. It was another to realize that I was the elder of a sect, at least in core formation, easily powerful enough to level a town, or change the course of a battle on my own. There was a distance there, a gulf in perspective wider than any I’d seen in my last life, that even the brotherhood of the cups could not easily overcome.
“You know, I didn’t really expect you to come back.” He said instead. “Twas more than passing strange you stopped by our town in the first place. We don’t get real cultivators in Xiamen, not often. Damn near shit myself when I felt you approaching. Thought the Shan had sent someone behind the lines, to burn the countryside.”
“I wasn’t sure I would either honestly. I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure it was prudent.”
“Prudent?” He snorted. “What’s prudence matter to a man like you? It ain’t prudence that keeps cultivators from bothering with fireflies like us. If you wanted to, why would you let prudence stop you?”
“Even for a man like me, there are threats it is not prudent to advertise my presence to. Perhaps an example would better explain. Just last night, a few hours after I passed Xiamen, I met a man on the road. We fought, for a reason as banal as it is irrelevant. I triumphed, but he was far from weak.”
I paused.
“Even the false name I have given you, is not safe to spread widely. For if he ever heard it, and wandered here, it might mean disaster. I do not think he is that craven, but I cannot say I am certain. Chaos follows in my wake.
“It is imprudent to sow ties of karma with someone who might be endangered by the destruction that dogs me.” I explained, paraphrasing my fear in a way congruent with my mask.
“That’s a whole cow worth of shit.” Zhao Xue said. “As if we didn’t already know that if another cultivator wanders into town, we’d best not mention hide nor hair about you being here.”
“I’ve been living in the shadow of the mighty my whole life.” Qin Wenyan scoffed. “I don’t need to be taught how to better scramble between their feet.”
“Young as we might be to you, we’re grown men. You can trust us to handle our own confidences.” Zhao Xue continued, indignant.
I sighed. “It’s not my confidence I’m concerned for, but your lives.”
“It’s not much of a life to worry over.” Zhao Xue said, leaning back against the wall. “Seeing the end so close makes it easy to be righteous. Perhaps ”
“And this old soldier still has a few tricks left in him.” Qin Wenyan added boisterously. “I’ve seen even sect elders laid low by trickery and massed fire. If any demon dogs your steps, he’ll find more than he bargained for blundering about his majesty’s domain.”
I sighed again. “We’ll have to agree to disagree. I trust your honor and competence, enough that I sit here with you. But three can keep secrets when two are dead, and I much prefer the pair of you among the living. Let’s talk about something less dangerous.”
“Hah! Three can keep secrets when two are dead. I like that.” Zhao Xue said. “Fine then. Let’s talk about the weather, like the old men we are. Brother Wenyan, how are your preparations for winter going?”
“Why, brother Zhao, they are proceeding as smoothly as the finest silk.” Qin Wenyan replied with exaggerated enthusiasm. “I’ve completed my harvest, and begun drying my grain for the coming season. My garlic is dried and my root cellar stocked to the brim. I’ve tried several new recipes for pickles, and I am most excited about my new sweet pickled eggs. I’ve even convinced Old Yang to let me use one of his vats to try my hand at making my own rice wine!”
He turned to me, a shit-eating grin plastered across his face.
“Why, brother Fang, what have you been doing in preparation for winter? Are you concerned about the changing seasons?”
“It’s funny. My own duties are rather divorced from the seasons. The cold doesn’t touch me as it did when I was mortal. But I’ve always liked the bleakest of days. When air is dry and the wind runs fast, when the cold is sharp enough to crack the skin and draw blood. When a tomb of ice pulls limbs from trees, and the mud freezes hard. Rarely do I feel more alive, then when the world is at its least hospitable.”
“Huh.” Qin Wenyan said. “Personally, I prefer to sit inside on such days, and drink.”
“That’s not bad either.” I allowed.
“Ah, but the gods haven’t crafted a day you wouldn’t prefer to spend sitting inside and drinking.” Zhao Xue added.
“Hey! On beautiful summer days, I sit outside and drink.” Qin Wenyan retorted. He closed his eyes for a moment, and exhaled. “I know that I drink too much, brother Zhao. Hells below, but you do too. You can stop bringing it up every day.”
Zhao Xue began to say something, but Qin Wenyan continued speaking over him.
“I’ve never shied away from my duty. I faced fire and steel without fear. I labored from dawn to dusk for years without complaint. I built up this house from nothing. My family never lacked for food or clothing. Is it a crime that I would rather face the day with a little wine?”
Zhao Xue sighed. In its wake, the silence grew heavy. I doubted this was the first time they’d had this argument.
“Brother Wenyan, I drown myself because I have lost everything. I do not want company in my misery so desperately I would see you do the same.” He said slowly.
The two of them sat quietly, pointedly not quite looking at each other. I too, looked away, casting my vision about the house, so I had an excuse not to meet their eyes. It was a functional place, with the common two room setup you often saw in cottages. One great room, with the hearth and a table, and a small secondary room for when you needed privacy. For three, it would have been tight, but for one, I had no doubt it was lonely. It was not a very homey place, not anymore. I could still see the marks from where a rug had once lain, the scuff marks from where a wardrobe had been dragged. Qin Wenyan’s spare clothes were piled into a wicker basket in the corner. It was less a home, than the corpse of one.
“What about you?” Zhao Xue finally said, breaking the silence. “Oh stranger in the company of a pair of drunkards?”
There was a question there, but for the life of me I wasn’t sure what he was asking. If I was an alcoholic? Why I was here with them drinking?
“I never had an issue handling my drink as a mortal. No shortage of examples in the family of what happened to you if you drank too much. Never really got into spiritual wine, as a cultivator. Seems like an expensive habit to keep up. But tonight, I find myself wishing I had some. I don’t want to drown my sorrows, but to forget them for a night does not sound unpleasant.”
Sometimes, you didn’t need to understand a question to answer it. Another memory flashed through my mind, sitting by a fire in the Oklahoma woods with my father. Chicken and apple sausages, and a talk that had gone long into the night. Him sipping his Johnny Walker, as I struggled to roast individual pieces of chocolate over the fire without letting them fall into the coals. I’d gotten tired of marshmallows and graham crackers, so in my young mind the only logical thing to do was to stick a single hershey's rectangle on the end of my stick and try to melt the whole thing without letting it drip.
I quashed the memory.
“Hah. If only it were so easy. I’ve never had a sip of a drink I didn’t want to finish. Can’t say I’d mind a sip of spiritual wine.” Qin Wenyan said thoughtfully. “I can see why it’s a trap though. Few things sound more appealing than getting drunk and feeding your cultivation at the same time.”
“If I ever purchase some, I’ll be sure to swing by and share it with you. I wouldn’t mind learning to make it myself, but I don’t think I can. I’ve always found brewing and fermentation interesting, but only ever dabbled in it.”
“Why not?” Zhao Xue asked. “What’s stopping you?”
“My duties don't lend themselves to a predictable schedule. I might be called away for weeks or months at a time without warning. I suppose I could work around it, find an assistant that could be trusted to manage the fermentation, but at that point, I might as well just buy it.”
Stolen novel; please report.
It wasn't the real reason, but it was a reason.
“Do you enjoy them, these mysterious duties of yours?” Qin Wenyan asked, staring intently at me. I wondered how serious he was about truly pursuing cultivation again, and if I should encourage or discourage him. Or if it was even my place to have an opinion on it. My immediate reaction was that it was simply wrong for a man to leave his family behind, but I didn’t know the details of his circumstances. Would it really be better for them, if he continued to wallow here, working hard enough to get by, drinking himself to death? I didn’t know exactly how military pensions worked, but from how organized the empire was, I doubt they lacked a death benefit.
“Less than I once did, I think. When I was a younger man, I found the thought of being a swordsman without peer appealing. Almost all men do, I think, at least for a time. I walked that road farther than most. There's an appealing sort of simplicity to it, I suppose. There’s a saying in my homeland; when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The sword engenders a similar sort of problem solving.”
“But something changed?” Zhao Xue asked, shifting away from the wall he’d been leaning against.
“I find that I am not the same person I was a few years ago. So much of the bloodshed just seems pointless now.”
It grated, that every other word out of my mouth was a lie. Talking about when I was mortal as if it were centuries ago, not days. Omitting why exactly I’d never tried spiritual wine. Speaking about my duties as if I’d ever performed them. Even here, among mortals, I was Elder Hu Xin. Or rather, Elder Hu Xin pretending to be Fang Tao. Even simple honesty about my feelings had to be couched in falsehood, to weave a historical narrative that was plausible. I hated how easy it was starting to come to me.
At least, with these two men, I could be honest about the fact that I was lying about my identity. Even if I was lying about why.
“Why don’t you just stop then?” Qin Wenyan asked. “What are they gonna do, fight you over it?”
“I’ve considered it. But rising higher doesn’t always mean you’re freer. I matter now, in ways that I didn’t before. It’s one thing for a mortal to desert an army. You’re one man among thousands, there’s only so much the state can care. For a sufficiently powerful cultivator, that changes. Even I have a superior, no matter how high you rise there’s always someone stronger than you out there. I might be able to get away with it, if I traded one master for another, or ran far enough. But he also might just chase me to the ends of the earth. I suspect his techniques make distance less of a concern than it might be for the rest of us.”
There was silence again, as they processed that. Thought about what it might look like, for someone’s talents to make distance a non factor. Meng Xiao scared me. I still didn’t know if the pocket dimension the sect existed in was something he’d found, and squatted in, or if he was simply powerful enough to bend space like that. Could he track me through shadows, or listen in on conversations anywhere in his domain? It was paranoia talking, but when you had little information to reason on, paranoia was a most persuasive speaker. In many ways, this little trip had been something of a trial run, for leaving the sect. Gathering information so that if I did need to make that call, it wouldn’t be totally blind.
“You know, you’re not making achieving foundation establishment sound all that appealing right now.” Qin Wenyan finally said. “All the same problems, and you can’t drink mortal wine anymore.”
“Oh, it has its perks.” I smiled. “I still remember how frail a fully mortal body feels in comparison. Even if you completely ignore the benefits of longevity and power, the improvements to your health alone are worth it. Never suffering a runny nose or lingering cough again, never waking with strange aches. Sure, I can’t easily get drunk. But I don’t get hungover either.”
“Hah! You’re telling me this!” Zhao Xue said, rubbing his lower back. “I should be the one reminding you what you’ve got. These old bones are going to be mighty stiff come morning.” He turned to Qin Wenyan. “Well, stop acting like a young girl at her first dance and spit it out already.”
Qin Wenyan’s face turned red. Or, redder, rather. He was already quite flush from the drink, now he looked like a tomato as he struggled to find an excuse to avoid my eyes.
“Right then.” He said, visibly mustering up his nerve. “Look. I’ve been thinking, this last day. I know you said you don’t go around announcing yourself all pompous like because you don’t like people asking you for things. So, don’t feel obligated to help me if you don’t want to. What am I saying, you, feel obligated. Obviously you don’t have to do anything.”
“Spit it out, man.” Zhao Xue laughed. Both men were red as tomatoes now. Zhao Xue reminded me of a pink jack-o-lantern in this moment, with his nearly bald head, missing tooth, and great wide smile. “You’d think you’re asking permission to give his daughter a courting gift.”
“Fucking fine.” Qin Wenyan grit out. “I want to make foundation establishment before I die. There. I said it. You’ve clearly done it, I was hoping you could tell me what I’m doing wrong, why I’m stuck in the mud.”
There it was. The elephant in the room. Or, one of them. Frankly we were dancing around a whole bunch of issues here, us three sad sops. I took a sip of my drink as I thought. There were a lot of reasons to turn him down. My own limited and uncertain knowledge. His family, however broken. But was it my place to make those judgements for him? In stories, cultivators talked a lot about sowing karma with others by teaching them. As a child of the modern world, that never resonated with me. It was trite to say that information should be free. But trite or no, I generally believed it. My mind was wandering. I already knew what I was going to do, I was just trying to justify it to myself, because I was afraid it might lead him down a self-destructive road.
He had been friendly. To speak cost me nothing. His fate was his own. All these things felt hollow, when everything I’d learned suggested that the best way for him to achieve his goal would be to throw himself back into war, because no sect would take him at his age. All the same, if I’d been in his shoes, I would want to know.
“Before I talk about this, I need you to understand something.” I said slowly. “That someone has risen high doesn’t mean they understand the process of cultivation fully, even for realms they’ve long since passed. It just means they understood their own road well enough to walk it. What I’m about to share with you are the general truths about the stage I’ve gathered from reading between the lines of a hundred manuals.”
“I see, it’s been so long since you were a lowly qi condensation cultivator you’ve completely forgotten it.” Qin Wenyan joked.
I frowned. While ironically that was in a way completely true, given that I did have no memories of it, it was also totally missing the point.
“That wasn’t false modesty. Even if you could replicate it, you cannot assume what worked for me would work for you. If you would walk this road, you can’t trust anyone else’s word, not completely. Blind faith makes it all too easy to end up in a dead end, or worse.”
“I get it, you’re worried about sowing bad karma and all that.” He said, staring at me with clear eyes, despite his impressive level of intoxication. “Look, you don’t own my failures. I do. Your advice can’t be any worse than Zhao Xue’s.”
I wasn’t just trying to get him to take my advice with a grain of salt. If there was one thing that I was sure of, from reading all those manuals, it was that you couldn’t just blindly follow any of them. Some required certain resources, others a particular kind of person or place. The world’s most legendary Abyssal Yin Sword Sutra would be virtually useless to a pacifist man with a yang heavy constitution who lived far inland.
“Let’s approach this from a different direction. What’s your current cultivation routine like?”
“Well, I wake up in the morning, and I cultivate for an hour. I cycle like the sergeant taught me. It feels pointless now though, like I'm spinning a mill but there's nothing to grind.”
That felt right, if his cultivation method wasn't suited for his surroundings.
“Do you know the name of the cultivation method the sergeant taught you?”
“He never gave me no manual, an enlisted man isn't worth paper, just beat the steps into me until I could recite them in my sleep. He called it the Ninefold Iron March.”
I nodded, as if that meant anything to me. Was that nine signifying it had nine stages per realm, or something to do with multiple people being required? That would fit for a soldier. Did the iron part signify weapon qi? Was it optimized for a soldier's nomadic life?
“Are you sober enough to cycle for me?”
“Hah!” Qin Wenyan roared. “If I wasn’t able to cycle drunk, Sergeant Chen would have drummed me out of the unit before I ever made the third stage.” He shuddered. “Or worse, he might’ve forbidden me from drinking.”
Immediately, he straightened up and closed his eyes. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Zhao Xue smiling at the pair of us. I ignored the cheeky old shit, and focused on my own spiritual senses. I’d been nearly blind to them at first, but I was slowly beginning to wrap my head around them. It was the way that those senses weren’t some sort of separate thing that had tripped me up. I’d grown up on urban fantasy stories about the Sight, and I’d expected a cultivator’s spiritual sense to be something similar, like another way of looking, a view into another layer of reality. Now, my current hypothesis was that spiritual sense was less like seeing, and more like feeling, extending an intangible part of yourself beyond your skin.
As Qin Wenyan began cycling, I closed my eyes and let myself start leaking. That was how it felt, within the body, it felt like qi moved like a fluid, driven by forces like pressure and rotation. But outside of it, it orbited like satellites around a star, or perhaps like an atmosphere around a planet. It was bound to me, no, more than that, it was part of me. But by slowing the rate at which it spun, and the force with which I clung to it, I could allow it to seep out into the world around me.
I’d figured that out during the fight with Wang Li, when the shock of being stabbed had jolted me out of the metaphysical posture of tight control I’d been in since arriving. Though, this usage was a lot less violent than the one I’d subjected that idiot to. It wasn’t a pulse, a wave of power pushed out of me, like the ones I’d used before to silence crowds. Instead, my power suffused the space around me, coexisting with the ambient qi without affecting it. Absent the dedicated motions of a cycling pattern, the two flowing masses of qi simply existed in the same place, neither’s movement influencing the others. Or, perhaps it was my own qi that did not affect the environment? Because when mine was out, I could feel the flows of ambient qi, sense them moving through the field of energy I was exuding.
I wasn’t certain that this is what cultivators meant when they said spiritual sense, but I definitely felt I was on the right track.
I allowed my qi-field to envelope Qin Wenyan, and felt almost exactly what I’d expected. What I’d feared. I could feel traces of vibrations from him, a gentle breeze that could not hope to budge the steel storm that was my own qi. But like my own power, it wasn’t interacting with the environmental qi. Every so often, he captured tiny wisps of power, but most of it wasn’t even pulled into his cycling to later escape, it simply didn’t resonate with his cultivation method at all. As he’d said, the wheel was turning, but there was nothing there to grind.
“That’s enough.” I said. “You can stop now.”
Qin Wenyan opened his eyes, staring expectantly at me.
“How much did your sergeant tell you about the mechanics of cultivation?”
Qin Wenyan kept staring at me. Then, he started laughing. Slowly, his chuckles grew into great belly laughs, and Zhao Xue and I were drawn inexorably in, despite having no idea what we were laughing about.
When we all quieted down, he finally explained.
“Sergeant Chen was an excellent sergeant. That means he made sure I made sure he beat the Ninefold Iron March into our thick skulls. He said it was a good method for a soldier, that he'd followed it all the way into foundation establishment. He answered questions, as best he could. But a soldier isn’t a cultivator. We don’t get pills, or lessons. They teach us a method, and we count ourselves lucky if we can rise a few small realms between the marching and the fighting. I doubt he was told any more than we were, anything else he learned on his own.”
That explained some things.
“Well,” I began. “I don’t think he was wrong about that. It probably is a good method for a soldier. I’m not familiar with it, but if he made it to foundation establishment outside the bounds of a sect, it can’t be too bad. But the problem is that it’s a good method for a soldier, and you’re not one anymore.”
Much of what I was about to explain I’d learned from reading between the lines of the manuals in the repository. I was still very far away from any kind of working theory of how to determine which cycling patterns affected which sorts of qi, but I was getting more and more confident in my understanding of the basic principles, at least at the qi condensation level. Being the first, that realm had been climbed more times, and in more different ways, than any other. As a result, manuals had far more useful things to say about the actual rules of the process than they did for the later stages.
“In qi condensation,” I continued. “A cultivator works to draw qi in from the surrounding world, and make it their own. The end result of most manuals is the same, a growing volume of what we call true or innate qi. But cultivators write thousands of different manuals even for that first stage because different people, and different circumstances require different cycling patterns. The Ninefold Iron March needs something you’re not providing it to function. I don’t know the secrets of that method, but it’s probably one or more things you had as a soldier but are missing from your life now. It might be comrades, or regular martial practice, or even the daily marching.”
“So, you’re saying I need a new cultivation method.” His head sank a little.
“It would be the cleanest solution. The problem would only get worse the higher you rose, in qi condensation, you should still be able to simply change cycling patterns without risking deviation, but that wouldn’t be true if you attained foundation establishment. You might be able to make your current method work if you trained with weapons more often, or marched dozens of li on your own, but you’d likely hit an even harder bottleneck eventually if you keep forcing it.”
“Do you think it would work for me again, if I became a soldier once more?” Qin Wenyan asked, his voice like that of a man awaiting sentencing. Desperate for an answer, but terrified of it.
“I think that you should change your cultivation method to suit your life, not your life to suit your cultivation method. Cultivation makes us more of what we are, to live forever as something that does not suit you is no life at all.”
I didn’t mention the family he would be leaving behind, or the danger he’d be walking into. He knew those better than I did.
“I don’t suppose that you have a manual that would be suitable for an old fool like me lying around in one of those rings of yours?” He joked shamelessly.
“I don’t. I’ll keep an eye out though.”
It would be hard, in no small part because I didn’t know what sort of a manual would be suitable for a man like him. Sects chose their starter methods to synergize with the wellsprings of qi they were built on top of, the methods I’d seen that didn’t rely on access to one of those were often built on consuming natural treasures, or even spirit stones directly, or required very particular personal characteristics. But all the same, I meant it.
“You mean that? I was just making a joke, what you’ve told me already is far more than I deserve.”
Before I could respond, Zhao Xue interjected.
“Enough with all this talk of cultivation. You two are making me feel like I’m peeking on a girl bathing. Telling me secrets a shepherd isn’t meant to know. You keep it up and I’ll start puffing about like some young master.”
“You know.” I said, gears turning. “There’s no rule that says a young master has to actually be young. Just younger than his seniors.”
“No. Don’t even think about it.”
“Don’t you worry brother Zhao.” Qin Wenyan chimed in “You might be a late bloomer, but I’m sure one day we’ll find a sect that will take you on.”
“Don’t you dare.”
I stared him dead in the eyes.
“Fear not, young master Zhao. This one would never court death by disrespecting you.”
The look on his face was priceless.